Studies on Biodiesel Production Using Novel Technique

Abstract

Owing to the crisis of fossil fuels, the need for the search of alternate fuels is very urgent; this need arises for two maor reasons- to preserve the global environment and the concern about long term supplies of conventional hydrocarbon based fuels. Biofuel is referredd to as a liquid or gaseous fuels for the transportation sector that are predonimantly produced from biomass. Among the different possible sources, biodiesel, is derived from vegetable oils- edible & non-edible, animal fats, is obtained by reacting the oil or fat with an alcohol in the presence of a catalyst to give the corresponding mono alkyl esters; a process known as Trans-esterification. Biodiesel is a renewable replacement to fossil fuels. The present work reports transesterification of microwave treated oil via catalytic route which is the better option among all the routes using soya oil as a raw material. The catalyst used is Sodium Methoxide. The focus is on production of bio diesel at a lab scale using microwave treated oil as a raw material and study its effect on the conversion of biodiesel. The result of the project shows that the yield of the biodiesel obtained from microwave treated soya oil is much higher than that produced by conventional heating. Teh mass balance for methanol shows that there is a substantial loss of methanol to the surroundings, which may be because of the higher stirring speed during the transesterification reaction, which was carried out in an open beaker.